I've heard a number of reports recently about people setting up LLM agents to work on their email and other communications. The LLM has access to the user's email account, reads all the emails, decides which emails to ignore, drafts some emails for the user to approve, and replies to some emails autonomously. It can also hook into a calendar, confirming, arranging, or denying meetings. This is a very appealing prospect. Like most folks I know, the barrage of emails is a vexing toa...

The entire ecosystem around Claude Code is pretty confusing, the naming conventions are a mess and the pace of change is beyond any production tool I've seen. However Skills are probably the most misused. I see it at work at ton but a paper just came up on Hacker News: SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment LLM agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to ...

Over the weekend Ars Technica retracted an article because the AI a writer used hallucinated quotes from an open source library maintainer. The irony here is the maintainer in question, Scott Shambaugh, was harassed by someone's AI agent over not merging it's AI slop code. It's likely the bot was running through someone's local 'agentic AI' instance (likely using OpenClaw). The guy who built OpenClaw was just hired by OpenAI to "work on bringing agents to everyone." You'll have to forg...

Another entry in the Toy Optimizer series . Last time, we did load-store forwarding in the context of our Toy Optimizer. We managed to cache the results of both reads from and writes to the heap—at compile-time! We were careful to mind object aliasing: we separated our heap information into alias classes based on what offset the reads/writes referenced. This way, if we didn’t know if object a and b aliased, we could at least know that different offsets would never alias (assumin...

OK, so here we are at the end of the first week of Step Aside, Phone . Quick re-cap from last week - my average phone and tablet usage combined was approximately 4 hours per day (2.5hrs on phone, and 1.5hr on tablet). That's high! Hopefully this week was better? Tablet This one is easy - my screen time on my tablet has been zero, as I turned it off last week, and haven't turned it back on again. Instead I've been either reading RSS feeds quickly on my phone before bed, or reading a book o...

I sometimes assign open problems as extra credit problems. Some thoughts: 1) Do you tell the students the problems are open? YES- it would be unfair for a student to work on something they almost surely won't get. NO- Some Open Problems are open because people are scared to work on them. Having said that, I think P vs NP is beyond the one smart person phase or even the if they don't know it's hard maybe they can solve it phase. NO- See Page 301 of  this interview with George Dantzig  w...

First weekly recap for this fun life experiment. To remind you what this is all about : in order to help Kevin get back to a more sane use of his time in front of his phone, we decided to publicly share 4 weeks of screen time statistics from our phones and write roundups every Sunday. Yes, we’re essentially trying to shame ourselves into being more mindful about our phone usage. Let me tell you, it definitely works. Every time I do one of these experiments, I use the first week to prove...

Context: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats. Start here if you’re new to the story: An AI Agent Published a Hit Pi...

Computer science, at its most fundamental, is all about inputs and outputs. Consider the simple case of multiplying two numbers on a pocket calculator. You punch in some inputs — the specific numbers you want to multiply — and the screen displays an output representing their product. The reverse problem of breaking a number into its prime factors can be much harder, but it has the same basic… Source Computer science, at its most fundamental, is all about inputs and outputs. Consider the...

I introduced Showboat a week ago - my CLI tool that helps coding agents create Markdown documents that demonstrate the code that they have created. I've been finding new ways to use it on a daily basis, and I've just released two new tools to help get the best out of the Showboat pattern. Chartroom is a CLI charting tool that works well with Showboat, and datasette-showboat lets Showboat's new remote publishing feature incrementally push documents to a Datasette instance. Showboat r...

My friend taught me a really funny parsing algorithm this week and sent me Operator precedence by textual substitution . I love really funny parsing algorithms, so I wanted to try to figure out and explain why this algorithm works: An ingenious idea used in the first FORTRAN compiler was to surround binary operators with peculiar-looking parentheses: + and - were replaced by )))+((( and )))-((( * and / were replaced by ))*(( and ))/(( ** was replaced by )**( and then a...

“This is it. If I take one more step, I'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been.” ― The Lord of the Rings Kia Ora! Jet lag As usual, I was unable to get any sleep during my 16-hour flight. My plan was to go to bed at 23:00 local time and wake up 8–10 hours later, magically adjusting to the new time zone. Well, (un)surprisingly, it didn't work out. The first few days, I was waking up at 3–5 a.m. But the lack of sleep and the fatigue wasn't the only problem: I was...

The background image shows the Mengzhou capsule escaping from the Long March 10A booster, which itself keeps flying towards space. Inset images show the respective guided splashdowns of the capsule and booster as well as their mission patches. Images: CMSA / CMSEO / CALT | Graphic: Jatan Mehta On February 11, China successfully conducted an emergency escape test of its next-generation Mengzhou capsule , variants of which will fly astronauts to Earth orbit and the Moon . The uncrewed cap...

Britt and I are trading blog post titles. The topic Britt chose for me is “A piece of art you would like to see in person”. One of the many joys of art galleries is that you never know what you might see. A few weeks ago, I was surprised and delighted to encounter the J.M.W. Turner exhibit at the National Gallery of Scotland. I had likely seen Turner’s paintings before, but I didn’t know enough about him to characterise his style. After waiting in line for half an hour or so and startin...

I’ve been building SkySpottr, an AR app overlaying aircraft information on your phone’s screen , using your device’s location, orientation, and incoming aircraft data (ADS-B) to predict where planes should appear on screen, then uses a YOLO model to lock onto the actual aircraft and refine the overlay. YOLOv8 worked great for this… until I actually read the license. Welcome to Austin’s Nerdy Things, where we train from scratch entire neural networks to avoid talking to lawyers. ...

I am deeply frustrated with my inability to stick to the plan and do this post once a month. But I will really make an effort from now on because the more I delay the more links (and tabs) pile on and I end up not being able to share everything. Bookmarks related to tech and web development Webmentions by Joe Crawford. Selfish reasons for building accessible UIs by Nolan Lawson. Radical Web . Bot or not? by Oleh. Charity Digital Skills . Being lazy with view-transition-old and...

Today was a hard day for $reasons , so it was a tremendous joy to receive a notification from the local Australia Post parcel locker that my latest shipment from Ukraine arrived! I braved the midday Sydney summer sun, walked down to the post office, and scanned the QR code to pop open the appropriate locker. I reached inside, and retrieved a well packaged cardboard box covered in a printed invoice with a mixture of Ukrainian and English. The shipping label said it was from Lviv, from where ...

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Dreamer is the name of the platform and company I started with Hugo, Nicholas and others a little over a year ago. The company was lovingly christened /dev/agents in homage to Stripe while we contemplated our real name. Dreamer is the name of the platform and company I started with Hugo, Nicholas and others a little over a year ago. The company was lovingly christened /dev/agents in homage to Stripe while we contemplated our real name.

When programming, we need to allocate memory, and then deallocate it. If you program in C, you get used to malloc/free functions. Sadly, this leaves you vulnerable to memory leaks: unrecovered memory. Most popular programming languages today use automated memory management: Java, JavaScript, Python, C#, Go, Swift and so forth. There are essentially two types of automated memory managements. The simplest method is reference counting. You track how many references there are to each object. When ...

Diagnostics Factory Feb 16, 2026 In Error Codes For Control Flow , I explained that Zig’s strongly-typed error codes solve the “handling” half of error management, leaving “reporting” to the users. Today, I want to describe my personal default approach to the reporting problem, that is, showing the user a useful error message. The approach is best described in the negative: avoid thinking about error payloads, and what the type of error should be. Instead, provide a set o...

The Chronicle of Georgia, via Wikipedia . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: My book is a finalist for the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Book Prize . Housing The Atlantic has a piece on how difficult and user-unfriendly most smart home technology still is. This was true when Gizmod...

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